This is the second movie in Krzystztof Kieślowski’s great Colours trilogy, now on rerelease; here white is the colour of death, the colour of winter, the colour of orgasm (a climactic, screen-filling flash of pleasure) and also the colour of a clean slate and a fresh start about to be muddied and spoiled. Theoretically, it addresses not just the middle colour of the French flag, but the second tenet of the revolution as well – equality – which it does by dramatising some outrageous inequality. It also satirises the specious new equality and meritocracy of gangster capitalism, on the rise in post-Soviet Poland.
Working again with composer Zbigniew Preisner, Kieślowski audaciously jolts the tone away from the dreamy, tragic and cosmic loneliness of Blue (whose protagonist, Juliette Binoche, is glimpsed again here) to a vinegary black comedy of marital breakdown, poverty and immigrant anxiety; it also contains one of the biggest, bleakest laugh lines in European cinema. Karol, the poverty-stricken Polish hairdresser in Paris has no money or passport, and finds he can only get back to Poland by stowing away in a trunk belonging to a Polish acquaintance. In Warsaw, this expensive-looking trunk is stolen by crooked baggage handlers who are furious to find only a homeless man inside. After being savagely beaten, Karol looks around at a snowy-white rubbish dump and gasps: “Home at last!” No one could accuse Kieślowski of romanticising his homeland.
